Software development

Software development

For almost ten years, the DORA research initiative has explored the effectiveness and metrics of top-performing organizations driven by technology. This effort has gathered insights from over 36,000 professionals from various sizes of organizations and a wide range of industries. DORA aims to unravel the link between operational practices (capabilities) and their outcomes, focusing on significant achievements both organization-wide and to its members.

Prior to this release, SPFx projects leveraged a Gulp‑based build toolchainto orchestrate tasks such as compilation, bundling, and packaging. While familiar, this model has long been considered dated relative to modern JavaScript and TypeScript workflows. At the same time, older SPFx templates and generator outputs triggered npm audit vulnerabilities and lagged behind current dependency expectations. Version 1.22 addresses both concerns by transitioning to a new toolchain and cleaning up scaffolded solution vulnerabilities.

As modern technologies such as artificial intelligence grab today's headlines, it's worth remembering that their foundations were being laid more than half a century ago by computer scientists, philosophers, psychologists, developers, entrepreneurs, and more. These pioneers and those who followed tackled issues and solved problems that future generations may never know existed - but without their seminal work, we wouldn't be where we are today.

My office is two kilometers away, and on foot the trip takes about twenty-five minutes, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less. Like most locals, I eventually switched to a bike, and the commute dropped to around 6.5 minutes. Later, I found a shorter route without bridges or traffic lights; my commute dropped down to about 4.8 minutes. If you plot these trips over time, you get a picture like this:

According to the latest commit in the public GitHub repository, no new features, enhancements, or pull requests will be accepted in the MinIO community edition, and critical security fixes will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Existing issues and pull requests will not be actively reviewed, with community support continuing on Slack on a best-effort basis, and the company encouraging users to migrate to MinIO Enterprise.

Cloudflare has open-sourced tokio-quiche, an asynchronous QUIC and HTTP/3 Rust library that wraps its battle-tested quiche implementation with the Tokio runtime to simplify the development of high-performance QUIC applications. The library was used internally to back the edge services, the Oxy HTTP proxies, or MASQUE-based tunnels, replacing Wireguard-based tunnels in the WARP client. Tokio-quiche is now available as an open-source crate on crates.io, with its source hosted in the quiche repository.

Blazing-fast installs uv is routinely 10-100× faster than pip (and often faster than Poetry or pipenv too). Dependency resolution and wheel installation that used to take seconds or minutes now finish in the blink of an eye. One tool to rule them all uv replaces pip + venv + pip-tools + pipx + virtualenv + pyenv in a single binary. You get dependency resolution, lockfiles, virtual-environment management, isolated global tool installation, Python version management, and even script running - all through the same uv command.

Built around Gemini 3, Antigravity isn't just a smarter code editor. It's a platform where agents can autonomously plan and complete end-to-end development tasks - writing code, launching servers, testing features, and generating artifacts like walkthroughs, implementation plans, and screenshots. To be honest this feels like an automatic upgrade from cursor. Furthermore, Antigravity integrates directly into Google Cloud ecosystems. Developers open a browser tab, authenticate with their Google account, and start coding instantly - no downloads, no local setup, no extension management.

Unified observability signifies the possession of one consistent view over all the parts of a distributed system - applications, infrastructure, and services. With modern systems being spread over several clouds, microservices, and APIs, the only way to have such visibility is through open standards and distributed tracing. Standards such as OpenTelemetry not only make it easier to collect but also to correlate the telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from various components. According to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey, 85% of respondents reported investing in OpenTelemetry.

Although Linux didn't reach the 10% mark as I had expected by the end of the year, all signs point to steady growth that could lead to a significant change in 2026. Because of the popularity of Linux, I thought I would create a list of my all-time top 11 distributions that I've used over the years. Some of these distros are no longer with us, while some of them are still thriving.

The best way to resolve a conflict or debate is to make the argument of your opponent better than they could. You literally have to make a better version of their argument, state it back to them, then ask, "Did I miss anything?" That clarity of understanding is the foundation for any possible change of mind for all parties involved, including ourselves.

Like many front-end developers, I don't have a formal computer science background. I rolled into this discipline as a designer wanting more control over the end product and though I did get a bachelors of ICT degree, the actual studies were, ahem, quite light in terms of "fundamental computer science". This means all I know about capital-s Software Development, I learned as I went from various sources. If that's you too, this article hopefully saves you a few years.

With the emergence of the Beta generation, there are seven distinct consumer demographics to serve, each with unique needs that we must satisfy as developers, Hughes said: Traditionalists, baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and Beta babies. By exploring and understanding the values of the modern customer connection, we can build brands and a business for future success, he mentioned.

As memory prices continue to rise, it is time engineers reconsidered their applications and toolchains' voracious appetite for memory. Does a simple web page really need megabytes to show a user the modern equivalent of Hello World? Today's Windows Task Manager executable occupies 6 MB of disk space. It demands almost 70 MB before it will show a user just how much of a memory hog Chrome is these days. The original weighs in at 85 KB on disk.

Lubuntu is the Ubuntu flavor with the LXQt desktop environment. LXQt uses Qt. For those who don't know, Qt is a powerful, cross-platform development framework used for building native-looking GUI applications that run on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android. Qt has its own IDE (Qt Creator) and extensive tools and libraries for developing, and the apps are capable of using a single codebase across different platforms and even.

Research going back almost 100 years finds that when you have a task to complete, you are highly motivated to finish it. It stays active in your memory, and you seek opportunities to get it done. That tendency is normally a good one. But on a break, it is a factor that will drive your mind back to the workplace-even when you're supposed to be relaxing. To give yourself the best chance to chill, see if you can close out key tasks before you leave. At a minimum, reach a good stopping place on tasks so that you don't feel like you have left them incomplete.

November 18 started like any other day. I was up early to finish some articles to meet a deadline. I was in the middle of doing so and needed some information to finish them. I figured that information would be easy and quick to get from ChatGPT so I had procrastinated doing the work. Just what I needed: when I opened ChatGPT on my laptop, I got some strange message about my credentials being invalid.

Pear OS has had a bit of history. It started out as a Debian-based Linux distribution called Pear OS. Then, out of nowhere, it was renamed Comice OS. The rename gremlins struck again, and it was back to Pear OS. Pear OS was then sold to a company hoping to keep the distribution alive, but that experiment did not last long, and a single developer, Alexandru Bălan, brought it back, only this time as pearOS.

Unified observability signifies the possession of one consistent view over all the parts of a distributed system - applications, infrastructure, and services. With modern systems being spread over several clouds, microservices, and APIs, the only way to have such visibility is through open standards and distributed tracing. Standards such as OpenTelemetry not only make it easier to collect but also to correlate the telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from various components.

OpenAI has released GPT-5.2-Codex, a new version of its agentic AI model for software development that focuses specifically on professional software engineering and cybersecurity. The model builds on GPT-5.2 but has been further optimized to work independently within complex development environments. With this release, OpenAI is positioning Codex not just as a programming assistant but as a broader support technology for the entire software development process.

Hybrid apps won - native apps were neglected. Nowadays, everyone uses cross-platform hybrid desktop apps written in JavaScript, ignoring excessive CPU and RAM usage. You most likely use a hybrid, native-like, cross-platform code editor for day-to-day programming activities. It may work fine on your computer because you've upgraded your hardware, since it may have worked slowly before. If you check the resource usage of your favorite code editor, you'll see not megabytes of RAM, but gigabytes of RAM; that's not fair and ethical.

Pear Linux was a French distro by David Tavares, based on Ubuntu and GNOME but heavily themed with custom fonts, icons, menu layouts, and more, all intended to make it visually resemble Apple's Mac OS X as closely as possible. As DistroWatch records, it went through some seven releases between 2011 and 2013, before Tavares announced that an unnamed company had bought it, and the distro vanished. Some contemporary reviews of PearOS 3.0 (2012), PearOS 7.0, and PearOS 8.0 (both 2013) - especially their screenshots - will give you an idea of how well it accomplished that. The idea has enduring appeal. After it disappeared, there were attempts to revive it, including Pearl Linux and Clementine OS, both in 2014, but neither got far.

We want people to be able to ask questions as they would in everyday life; for example: 'I've just had a baby, do you know what help I can get?'

App developers looking to launch their programs in ChatGPT can now submit them for review and potential publication, OpenAI said Wednesday. The company also introduced a new app directory within Chat's tools menu that has swiftly been dubbed an "app store."

FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that is descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 and was developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable hardware. Since its inception, FreeBSD has continuously been the most commonly used BSD-derived operating system on the market. FreeBSD maintains a complete system: kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation.

Google Cloud has announced fully managed remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, enhancing its existing API infrastructure to support MCP and providing a unified layer across all Google and Google Cloud services. With the support for MCP servers, developers can point their AI agents or standard MCP clients, such as the Gemini CLI, to a globally consistent, enterprise-ready endpoint for Google and Google Cloud services.

Netflix has completed a major consolidation of its relational database infrastructure onto Amazon Aurora, reporting performance improvements of up to 75% and a 28% reduction in costs. The streaming giant's move from self-managed PostgreSQL on EC2 to the managed Aurora service highlights a broader industry trend toward offloading operational overhead to cloud-native database platforms. Facing challenges with a fragmented database landscape, Netflix's Online Data Stores (ODS) team struggled with the operational toil of managing deployed custom binaries, patching, and manual scaling.

GitHub will introduce a $0.002 per minute charge for self-hosted runners starting March 2026, ending years of free usage. While the company claims 96 percent of customers won't see higher bills, developers are pushing back against paying for software running on their own infrastructure. GitHub announced the pricing change on December 16, alongside a reduction in GitHub-hosted runner prices. From January 2026, GitHub-hosted runners will cost 20 to 39 percent less depending on machine type.